Data assimilation: Making sense of SMOS soil moisture observations over Norway and Northern Areas
A candidate is sought for a challenging 3-year PhD studentship funded by the Norwegian Research Council. The candidate will be based at the Kjeller office of the Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU). The project is co-supervised by the Department of Physics (Plasma and Space physics) at the University of Oslo. It involves collaboration with the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (Met.no), the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center (NERSC), Météo-France, and the University of Toulouse/CESBIO.

The project will use data assimilation to improve the spatial and temporal soil moisture information provided by SMOS to be more in line with user needs, i.e. offer higher rate, higher resolution, wider area “snap shot” information. This addresses the challenge of using SMOS data to understand the hydrological cycle in Norway and Northern Areas, regions characterized by complex orography.

Details about NILU can be found at http://www.nilu.no/